The Theater: New Plays in Manhattan, Feb. 4, 1946

O Mistress Mine (by Terence Rattigan; produced by the Theatre Guild & John C. Wilson) brought the Lunts back to Broadway for the first time in over three years. It did not bring them back in anything worth a toy locomotive’s toot, but long before the curtain fell, the glittering first-night audience had ceased to care. The Lunts, as usual, had triumphed in themselves. They had once again proved their magic in vehicle jobs, in turning pushcarts into floats.

Vehicle jobs, for the Lunts, have a sort of advantage over solider plays: the pair can trot out their whole repertory of tricks, they can be versatile and uninhibited, they can be Lunt & Fontanne. In O Mistress Mine they romp happily up & down the comedy ladder—high comedy and broad comedy, badinage and burlesque—wowing the audience on every rung. If Actress Fontanne is a little too bubbly and gurgly at times, few of the customers seem to mind.

O Mistress Mine is the comedy the Lunts played in London last season under the no less Shakespearean title of Love in Idleness (TIME, Jan. 1, 1945). It tells of an attractive, broke widow who has been living in gay, sumptuous sin with a wartime British Cabinet Minister. Then her priggish, pinko 17-year-old son (well played by Dick Van Patten) comes home after five years at school in Canada. He forces his mother to choose between him and her lover and (possibly because a show must keep going until 11 o’clock) she chooses the son. But by 11 o’clock the son has decidedly mellowed and the lovers have arranged to be married.

Most of O Mistress Mine is about as real—and as valuable—as stage money, but it has a lot of actable scenes am passably agile dialogue. And Playwright Rattigan plainly wrote it for escape. Saic Actor Lunt on opening night, in one o his rare curtain speeches: “If in thi angry, suspicious world we have brough. you an hour or two of laughter, I am very grateful.”

O Mistress Mine marks the soth time that Lunt & Fontanne have played togetheron Broadway. Since 1924 they have acted in everything from Dostoevsky to Noel Coward, from high drama to sheer drivel. They have long been the most famous stage couple in the world—and year in, year out, probably the best box office. On the road, even when it had dwindled into a weed-choked path, they have never slipped. A week before O Mistress Mine opened on Broadway, it had a prodigious advance sale of $150,000.

The big reason for all this is, of course, their acting. Beyond its adroitness, beyond its shimmer of personality, their acting has the tingle and fizz that makes high fun of theatergoing. But there are other reasons. One is that the Lunts are married, which lends a piquancy-in-reverse to the stage’s most frequent living-in-sinners. Finally, there is Actress Fontanne’s miraculous, unchanging youthfulness. Nearing 60, she could still pass for a glamorous 40.

English-born Lynn Lily Louise Fontanne and Wisconsin-born Alfred Lunt, having both trouped for years, met just before each started to get famous. The meeting consisted of Lunt’s falling down some steps at rehearsal and sprawling at Fontanne’s feet. By 1922, the year they were married, Fontanne had had a great success in Dulcy and Lunt a great one in Clarence.

Two years later they began their great success as a team in The Guardsman (which they talk of reviving after O Mistress Mine). Since 1928, when Actress Fontanne appeared in Strange Interlude and Actor Lunt in Volpone, they have never played apart. Their hits have included Elizabeth the Queen, Reunion in Vienna, Design for Living, The Taming of the Shrew, Idiot’s Delight, There Shall Be No Night.

Blue Period. Most of the last three years off Broadway they spent in England. There they played There Shall Be No Night and Love in Idleness amid falling bombs and teetering scenery, and in theaters so cold that “Miss Fontanne was a lovely shade of light blue at the end of the first act.” They trekked about Europe playing to G.I.s. Actor Lunt discounts it all as “the greatest opportunity a ham actor could ever have. Give the credit to those who played Godforsaken places like Iceland.”

Actor Lunt is far more terrified of opening nights than of buzz-bombs. After 30-odd years of acting, at the first hint that something may have gone wrong he is ready to quit the stage for his Genesee Depot, Wis. farm. He even agonizes over the size of the audience, has had to be soothed with yarns about extra seats being placed in the aisles.

The Lunts love their 100-acre farm, where Alfred gets up at 5 a.m., and cooks like a master chef in the big Swedish kitchen. But the farm could never hold them for very long. They are the most stage-struck of actors. If one asks the other for a cigaret, they find themselves “going into a play,” spouting yards of dialogue from some old hit. Robert E. Sherwood calls them “both fundamentally hams. . . . Every meal they prepare is garnished with showmanship and served in three acts.” Whenever they are photographed working on their farm, “they have managed to assume the costumes and poses of The Gleaners.”

But their showmanship has its prankish side. Once, while playing in The Taming of the Shrew, they halted the show each time a latecomer stalked down the aisle, Lynn to bow low, Alfred to cry “Welcome!” Once, too, in the early days, when Miss Fontanne was offered a big movie part and Lunt a six-line butler’s role, she wired back: “My husband unable to memorize part that long.”

The Magnificent Yankee (by Emmet Lavery; produced by Arthur Hopkins) is a minor-key, home-&-fireside stage biography of Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. It gives about five minutes to the famous dissenting opinions, most of the evening to the devoted husband of a devoted wife. Playwright Lavery was clearly theater-wise in not attempting cerebral briefcase-and-black-robe drama—even though it was the only drama in Holmes’s life. But he has fallen short on his own terms. His Holmes, though not distorted, seems diluted. His story needs more juice, variety and movement.

The Magnificent Yankee rings up in 1902 on Holmes at 61, arriving in Washington to join the Supreme Court. It rings down on Holmes at 92 being visited by Franklin Roosevelt an hour after he had been sworn in as President. The years between are lightly tasseled with bits of history—T.R. glaring from the White House*, the scuffle over the Brandeis appointment to the Supreme Court, the Rosika Schwimmer case. The stage episodes are fleetingly peopled with well-known names—amiable Owen Wister, fussy, calamity-howling Henry Adams, Brandeis himself. They are thinly carpeted with human and humorous incident—Holmes’s steady stream of young secretaries, his Civil War memories, his eye for the ladies. But mostly everything is bathed in sentimental light. Louis Calhern (Ja-cobowsky and the Colonel) plays Holmes with spirit, wit and a feeling for style. He even, at the very end, succeeds in looking like him. The Holmeses grow old together, he always the courtly swain, she often the gentle-voiced boss; then Fanny Dixwell Holmes (nicely played by Dorothy Gish) dies. Their life makes a very pretty picture, but a rather typical and a not quite touching one; and it portrays in the end less a Holmes than a husband.

*Holmes grins back by quoting one of T.R.’s more naively conceited remarks: “The bravest man I ever knew followed me up San Juan Hill.”